pcalnon,
when you look at the datasheet for the ADXL203, the
leads/contacts are the brass-coloured rectangles you can see
on the middle picture, right next to the penny. They are
all surface-mount devices, so not the easiest thing to work
with.

If you can afford it, I highly recommend investing in one
of the little Evaluation Boards. You can plug them into any
old breadboard and start exploring what they do right away.

Hey Steve,
if getting the
spybotics to drive in a straight line is proving
challenging, consider equiping it with a
MEMS rate gyro, interfaced via I2C out of a PSoC. The voltage
delta out of the gyro is proportional to the turning rate
and signed, so it shouldn't be too difficult to do some
simple self-calibration and control.

I should have some more time this weekend to continue
exploring the PSoC Mini Dev Kit.

Well, I don't think I'm going to make tomorrow's deadline
for the contest; a single weekend isn't enough. It's gotten
me off to a good start though. It motivated me to power up
the MEMS Accelerometer and Gyroscope Eval boards I picked up
a while ago.

Been spending the day, on and off, trying to get a Linux
distro installed on the X-board.
Decided to focus on Debian (network install)
and LFS
(install to a bootable USB drive on another system).

I found this
site which describes the process for adapting an
existing system to USB-boot.

The challenge with the X-board is that the onboard 128MB
is the primary IDE partition - /dev/hda - and you can
install one other IDE device as the slave - /dev/hda. The
bios supports booting from /dev/hda, /dev/hdb (HD or CDROM),
USB (mass storage), or network. No second IDE channel for
/dev/hdc and /dev/hdd devices. I have a regular IDE DVD-ROM
drive and one of those external USB HD cases. I can boot
off an HD in the USB case, but stock-Linux installs "forget"
that they're running off USB; the DVD-ROM isn't recognized
as being a bootable device, so it has to be in the /dev/hdb
IDE device mode to be usable.

So now I'm going to try the LFS route onto a bootable USB
IDE drive, then use that to build a more compact install
into the onboard /dev/hda 128MB flash.

Now if I could just find a source for the
200-pin SODIMM connectors to built a 'bot around this
board...

What if, one were to wire up the tracking motor controls
on a Quickcam
Orbit to drive a robot platform.?. In Windows mode, the
automatic
face tracking becomes automatic person tracking. :-)
The Linux
driver supports the pan/tilt capabilities, but I don't
expect the pan/tilt is hardware-based, but that's reasonably
easy to overcome in software.

Received the P.A.M.
samples yesterday. Will start playing with them over the
weekend.

This is proving a lot more complicated than expected...
Matching up the ink with a compatible cartridge distribution
mechanism is beyond the scope of my own expertise. I'm
electrical, not a chemical engineer.

That said though, conductive ink pens exist, and older
pen plotter printers exist. Should be much easier to adapt
the pen to the printer. It won't be as high-res as a more
modern ink-jet printer, but it should work. Proof of
concept is all I'm aiming for at this point.